Very true words... health is one of those things that gets stolen away from you almost literally overnight and from there it's a major struggle to get back to normality. Most of us as kids would screw up our faces when our parents would say "You've got your health" when we moaned about not having anything - sadly, as with so many things, you don't realise how true that is until you're older.

The trouble is, you trip up with something, that later causes something else...and so on... you find yourself snowballing down into the pit of death .

Most of us as kids would screw up our faces when our parents would say "You've got your health" when we moaned about not having anything - sadly, as with so many things, you don't realise how true that is until you're older.

Mostly because it's being used in the same way as "think of the starving children in Africa". Of course there are people that are much, much worse off than us but if any comparison should always be towards the lowest possible bar then you'll lose every time. Particularly if you throw in history on how growing up today is much better than most children through history, probably including your own parents and grandparents. After all, most people - certainly kids and other young people you identify with - do h

Mostly because it's being used in the same way as "think of the starving children in Africa". Of course there are people that are much, much worse off than us but if any comparison should always be towards the lowest possible bar then you'll lose every time. Particularly if you throw in history on how growing up today is much better than most children through history, probably including your own parents and grandparents. After all, most people - certainly kids and other young people you identify with - do have their health.

Also it's sometimes used as a poor man's equalizer, it doesn't matter that you're Steve Jobs you can still die a long drawn out death of cancer. In that yes your health is important and your health can't really be bought for money, but just because there's a variable you can't control doesn't mean poor and (good|bad) health beats rich and (good|bad) health. It's a just a way to mentally put a few people in the (rich, bad health) below you (poor, good health) in the feelgood hierarchy.

If this is intended to make you feel good about making poor choices, then carry on.

However, I'll tell you now that most people under 30 are typically living in a dream world. "Poor health" is a concept to most such "youngsters." When I was that age I'd been ill and I'd been injured, and I thought I understood. But, now, with the mild aches and pains of age creeping up on me slowly, I realize how big that gun is that I'm looking down the barrel of. Poor health isn't about being hit by a taxi-cab at 9 and get

Working flat-out at all costs to accomplish something can be extremely detrimental to both your physical and mental health. The line between sane and insane is much narrower than many imagine. Whilst you may write some cool code, what use is that if you end up losing your sanity, or worse your life?

For those wondering. Doing a simple Twitter search of @zhitomirskiyi, brings this recent tweet directly mentioning him:
https://twitter.com/#!/micahdaigle/status/135613279618871296 [twitter.com]
"@zhitomirskiyi, founder of @joindiaspora, has committed suicide.:("
about around 24 hours ago, long before it was announced on Techcrunch.
Then someone else mentioned suicide as well, but they delete their tweet, not before it was retweeted however:
https://twitter.com/justinherman/status/135619350538358784 [twitter.com]
"@amoration Found out colleague killed himself. Sending serenity in the passing of @zhitomirskiyi"
Sad to hear it.
R.I.P. Ilya Zhitomirskiy.
Thank you for your work.

By the time you're 20 you kinda get the plot, and it usually doesn't get any better after that.

I disagree strongly with that. I'm in my mid-40s, and so far I have to say that life has got better with each passing decade. Not necessily easier, mind you, but certainly better. My job has never been more interesting, and my kids are getting old enough to be not just fun but interesting to have deep discussions with. Perhaps most importantly, I know myself, my strengths and weaknesses better than I ever used to, I've got far more confidence than when I was younger, I'm happy with who I am, and I know how to apply myself and to work with the people around me to get stuff done.

after 50, you'll find that things have gotton worse; employers are no longer willing to consider you, your peers (should you HAVE a job, still) consider you an 'old fogey' and the cost of med insurance (even if you are mostly healthy) skyrockets.

lots of 'stuff' ahead of you and most of it is not all good. hate to break it to you (as one who is 50, now).

You can't be serious. Taking complete control is apparently being a coward and instead of trying to make his life work he simply finished it. A moment of bravery to save yourself a life of sacrifices? No.

It's interesting to see the range of reactions people have. This one, anger and condemnation, is pretty common. I always figured it was just a way to distance one's self from the pain rather than it being any kind of logical perspective.

I hadn't heard that there was Science behind it. Any links you have handy?

...the blog sites can't decide if he was 21 or 22. Most copy blindly off each other - and that includes Zdnet who should know better. Given that his work was in social networking and thus communication, I can't help but feel that he has been let down by the poor quality of communication surrounding his death.

His final posting on Diaspora was of a translucent butterfly [joindiaspora.com] on the 7th. There was nothing that really stood out to be in his other postings as being suicidal, so I'm not going to go with that theory until there's something a bit more solid than the rumourmill. However, if it does turn out that that was what happened, it would alter how this image should be seen and therefore show that this was no sudden thing.

When someone commits suicide, it's not always the case that they're going to smother the Internet with cries for help -- introverted especially, especially the geeky kind, tend to bundle up their emotions. Suicides can and do happen out of the blue.

As an educated (BS in SE), 25 year old male who has attempted suicide twice (and failed by chance/luck/bad luck), in general we do send out cries for help. They get dismissed or go unnoticed. They aren't "I'm going to kill myself tonight. Don't try to stop me." but more like "I don't really care" or "I just cause problems" along with a passive shrug cause you don't want to make the other person feel bad too.

Personally if someone had noticed my attempts, I think I would've been better off. The ones that are vocal about it get help, the ones that are discovered before death get help, but the ones that are barely strong enough to keep from going all the way just linger on in quiet misery without being able to get help or end it.

My respect to the guy. Humans die easily, but it takes a lot to kill yourself. He was stronger than me.

You really didn't want to commit suicide or you would have. Truth is that it is easy to commit a successful suicide. That being said I hope you are now getting some help. Depression is a terrible thing and can effect anyone. I am dealing with it now over the death of my mother.

This was only in reference to attempts not to feeling like you want to. There are just to many ways that one can kill themselves that any failed attempt says more to a desire to not die than luck. I meant it really as a complement to a part of yourself that has the strength to no give up. I am not a skilled writer so forgive my inability to communicate exactly what I meant in the way I meant it. What I was saying is that part of you really wants to live otherwise you would have pulled it off.So far I hav

Please get help. You cannot count on other people to notice these things, as we often project ourselves onto others. We are also notorious for choosing the easiest path when faced with tough decisions. That means assuming you are content and that your subtle cries for help are just quirky behaviour on your part. Therapy isn't a magic bullet, but I've seen it really help others I care about.

Hey, AC, even if your're not ready to go the full 'counseling' step, consider calling one of the hotlines for 'just a chat'. A five minute committment is worthwhile to just be able to talk to someone who doesn't know you and won't judge you.

And I make no pretense to know what it is like to want to commit suicide.

But I've always wanted to say to someone who was considering taking their life: why not just take your "life" instead?

And what I mean by that is, your situation in life. It obviously is not working, so abandon it. Take a plane to a far flung location on the globe, without any money or means of support, change your name, dissolve all ties to your previous existence, preemptively sabotage any way anyone could trace you, and live off trash or stolen mangoes from a tree, until something better comes along.

And become another person. Someone who might be happy someday.

Effectively "kill" yourself: all the identities you have with your current existence, the sum of all your relationships that aren't working, the job that fills you with nothing but misery, all of the reality around you that cages you about how you think about yourself. "Kill" all of the signifiers about who you currently are and how you think about your place in life.

And maybe the challenge and novelty of that will put you in a new frame of mind. And then you can be happy someday.

Of course, I know, the fear is you carry the seed of your depression around inside you, and even in a new life, the despondency will return. But I think, for many people, it is a combination of nature and nurture, and you, who you are, had your life gone another path, you might not be so depressed. We all are depressed at times, we all carry the seed of depression, and major depression too, were the situations in our life and how we come to think about ourselves had evolved a different way. So write a new story. Yes, you carry a seed of it inside you. We all do, and we aren't committing suicide because our seed never grew. So cut down the tree your seed has grown into, and move to new soil where the seed can't grow.

So restart the story. A lot of people talk about reinventing themselves, in ways they consider major, but are really minor. Consider the most radical reinvention possible, instead of suicide.

If someone is convinced that everything in life is meaningless, they are unlikely to have the perspective you present. It seems a little like telling someone who is depressed from a week of no sleep that they just need to "buck up"-- their mental state at that point will make your suggestion an impossibility. Depression can be like that-- you may understand objectively your depression, but that does not make it easy to simply say "Im going to stop being depressed now".

As far as I can tell, the biochemical contribution to depression is minimal to non-existent. Many studies have shown the failure of SSRIs to outperform placebo. Indeed SNRIs (which do the opposite) are also prescribed for depression.

That CBT works at all shows that depression in most cases is a largely down to habitually depressing thought patterns. There are other cases where this is not true at all.

The problem is the research is all methodically skewed to show the drugs work.

A common and accepted trick was to use a sugar pill as a placebo. I can tell the difference between a sugar pill and prozac and I'm not attuned to SSRIs.A ubiquitous and accepted trick is to never test the blind. In these multi-million dollar studies, nobody spends a few thousand asking the patients what they think they took. Why? Because the patients can nearly always guess [deep-trance.com] [my own site] (Fisher and Greenberg 1993). One pres

Paradoxically, some depressives seem like they're improving just before they commit suicide. Deciding on and planning out the deed, knowing that the end to their suffering is at hand can make them seem happier. This adds to the "out of the blue" perception.

A lot of time they don't want "help". A great many of them happen when someone is just coming out of the "too depressed to get out of bed" phase of cyclical depression, and they just don't ever want to go through that again.

I cannot believe I had to scroll down this far to find the first post that wasn't a brazen insensitive mockery or a joking jab at an assassination. Not that they normally bother me, but really even the announcement of Steve Jobs' death was at least 50/50. Maybe the project that he had didn't take off, but his ideals and his heart were in the right place, and if he did indeed take his own life, that makes it even more tragic.

Just demonstrates the cynical, borderline sociopathic nature of most/.ters =/

I have all the characteristics of a human being: flesh, blood, skin, hair; but not a single, clear, identifiable emotion, except for greed and disgust. Something horrible is happening inside of me and I don't know why. My nightly bloodlust has overflown into my days. I feel lethal, on the verge of frenzy. I think my mask of sanity is about to slip.

Please, guys, I know only a moron like myself doesn't know what this Diaspora project is, but couldn't you put a link or a two-word explanation? Yes, I know Google is my friend. Feel free to mod me down now.

It's not just an open source facebook clone. that would be simple as setting up a website with users, and user content, and the ability to link other's content. Bam, Facebook clone.

No, Diaspora was to be distributed. There's no central authority to decide who gets banned, blocked, censored, spied upon, and sold to marketers. It would be YOU in control of your social network. It was a noble goal. But it didn't seem to go anywhere.

I don't know anything about the guy, but suicide is always a damn shame. A

Google is my friend, too, yet I would have been ever so grateful for the tiniest social grace of sparing me yet another Google result set.

I'm pretty sure Lewis Thomas in Lives of a Cell (or possibly Et Cetera, Et Cetera: Notes of a Word-Watcher) comments about the sad decline of the elder statesmen: he hasn't forgotten anything so much as piled it so deep in the attic he can't find it without a substantial jog.

For about five minutes a year ago I knew what Diaspora was. Then it went directly to the Lewis Thomas attic of things I can only possibly remember once reminded.

Diaspora is like Facebook mashed up with Twitter. You have a stream to write musings and to listen to other people's. You subscribe to topics using hash tags and you have "aspects" (akin to groups / circles) to put associates / friends / family / followers into. Where it might appeal to geeks or just people interested in their privacy is that privacy is concretely defined and the project itself is open source so there are likely to be many hosts cropping up over time. Once hosts pop up you should be able to export your data as xml and import it into the new one. It would be nice if hosts joined together with some Jabber like IPC so it didn't strictly matter where you or your friends resided as long as they were reachable between nodes.

One area of particular appeal I see for the project is in serving enterprises. I can see Diaspora being pretty useful for places that want a facebook like application to serve an internal audience. e.g. you have 20,000 people in the company you might use aspects and the wall for general team and company level chitchat. Perhaps that's how the project ultimately intends to make money, selling support to these places.

Anyway I think it's early days for the project. It got a lot of bad press about 12 months back but its really rolling out in alpha form. It's still slow (and currently suffering from a bit of a Slashdotting), but it shows a lot of promise.

It's full of immature ACs who are too afraid to stand behind what they say, I suspect. *shrug*

I'm going to (again!) respond to my own post.

If you're one of those Anonymous Cowards who can't put a name behind your beliefs, then your belief or opinion is worth nothing. Sometimes anonymity is necessary for one reason or another. However I do believe that the majority of AC posts here (/.) are posted anonymously because the poster is either a troll or has so little self confidence that they're not sure if their belief will be "accepted" or not, and don't want to face criticism. *If* you fucking believe

Yeah, yeah, whatever. Maybe we realize that registration is pointless. You're not "anonymous"? You "put a name behind your beliefs"?

Really?

I'm guessing your birth certificate doesn't say "Psychotria". If you worked in the cubicle next to mine, I wouldn't even know that this was you. How are you any less anonymous than me? What, because I can see which of the comments on this specific website came from you, whereas you can't know for certain which AC comments came from the same person? BFD.

This is merely a reflection of the fact that many are fearful that their own abilities don't match their rhetoric or their self-conceived view of themselves. Posting anonymously only slightly retards the speed at which the reckoning comes. In reality little of even the greatest minds amounts to little that matters in time. Humans are rather limited in their intellectual capabilities, which are all relative to circumstance. It is difficult to confront the reality that one'

*If* you fucking believe something, *If* you are passionate about something, then fucking post it without hiding. If you can't post it without hiding behind the AC (and this obviously excludes people who post AC for legitimate reasons) then you doubt your own "belief" or "opinion" and why should anyone take you seriously.

Throw away all your stuff, shave your head, leave your home and your hometown, and start walking, heading in one direction. Drop your job. Stand and pee on the desk of your Boss. Run away from school. Do whatever you must, but do *not* kill yourself. It's about the stupidest thing you can do.

My Grandpa who dug the whole Nazi-Wehrmacht thing back then and went on to invade and fight on the eastern front in WW2 as a Waffen-SS Officer (Kompanieführer) gave me this advice he took home after the war: If everything you believed in is gone, the 3rd Reich, the Wehrmacht, your hometown and half of your homeland burned and lost to the russians of which a few million are now rightfull super-pissed and heading straight your way, raping and killing their way through whatever is left of the eastern german population, if your entire Kompanie is dead (two assistants aside, which got captured a few days ago) if the beloved Führer is dead (*his* beloved Füher - not mine (emphasis mine!)), Berlin is falling and you're hearing the gunfire, the Stalinorgel and their bombshells crashing in near Zossen just a few Kilometers away, your injured and they are coming to get you and they will tear you to tiny bits and pieces, and the maggots are eating away at the festering wound in your leg, your career and your life and everything you've ever believed in is basically over and out with no stone on another in bombed out Berlin for Kilometers in each direction... if all that has and just is happening before your very eyes right here and now... you might aswell just crawl on a few more meters and see if something interesting happens instead of putting a gun to your head.

He crawled on, found a deserted Wehrmacht horse, crawled on to its back sideways. The horse eventually rode to a gathering-camp. The nurses picked him up and the russians didn't deport him because his injuries were to severe - the lucky bastard.

Long story short, he lives to this very day (age 97) to tell us this advice. Old Type-A nazi or not, that actually *is* a very valuable advice. If *he* in that situation decided *not* to kill himself, so can you.

Actually that could lead to the most ironic possible turn of events... Diaspora's failure was not so much the product, as a failure to have a working product for the public at a time when the general media was paying attention... I don't know about anyone else but I actually got my diaspora invite yesterday (that I signed up for a year back). Before I get flamed, no I do not think this was planned for such, but I do think there is a 1/100 chance that his death may draw the media, that may possibly draw the public to check out his work. 10 years from now we may be looking at the digital equivalent of Van Gogh.

I don't know about anyone else but I actually got my diaspora invite yesterday (that I signed up for a year back).

Right there is the problem with Diaspora. Their sign-up process is ridiculous. I'm still waiting for my invite, and probably for just as long. At least Google let people invite their friends, when they were still doing the invite-only thing with Google+.

Diaspora has only really just launched and it works reasonably well for it too. It's a little slow but the experience is slick and I would have thought the privacy guarantees would meant at least geeks but possibly a wider audience would find the attraction in using it.

I would have thought the privacy guarantees would meant at least geeks but possibly a wider audience would find the attraction in using it

What privacy guarantees? Who has reviewed the federation protocol? Last time I checked, it was an ad-hoc pile of crap full of serious design flaws and the reference implementation (which was about as close as you got to real documentation for the protocol) was a security disaster. The difference between Diaspora and Facebook is that people actually had to pay for Facebook to harvest all of your 'private' information...

What privacy guarantees? Who has reviewed the federation protocol? Last time I checked, it was an ad-hoc pile of crap full of serious design flaws and the reference implementation (which was about as close as you got to real documentation for the protocol) was a security disaster. The difference between Diaspora and Facebook is that people actually had to pay for Facebook to harvest all of your 'private' information...

Well you've just answered it. All the source code is there to run your own pod so if you are paranoid about the official host you can run your own and disclose what you like. See http://podupti.me/ [podupti.me] for some pods that already exist. As for reviewing the code, the code is all there too on https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora [github.com] so review it to your own satisfaction or not. Diaspora makes no bones about being in alpha so I'm quite certain there are bugs to be found. Doesn't mean that the principle is sound and from reviewing some of the federation protocols in the wiki it appears to take reasonable security precautions, and takes advantage of emerging standards for distributed comment / pubsub feedback such as Salmon.

Can you review Facebook's code? Can you see what data they capture on your behaviour and activities and what they do with it? Can you host your own code? The answer is no you can't. Facebook Europe does offer some toos for limited disclosure of data but certainly not enough to satisfy people who are identified major omissions in it.

They do not actually present a case that suicide is not selfish, they merely assert that it is not selfish. The argument for saying that suicide is selfish is: committing suicide is saying that ending the pain that I am in is more important than not causing pain to those who love me. Or to put it another way, my wants are more important than the wants of those who love me.

When you're in such a state that you're actively considering ending your life, rational consideration of the feelings of others isn't at the top of your list of capabilities. It's a confusing and frightening place to be.
.

Trust me on that - I've had Bipolar type 2 for the last 30 years or so. When I'm functioning properly, I can see the effect the illness has had on those around me - when I'm on a major down, nothing apart from the endless spiral of negative introspection exists.

It's not selfish - it's mental hell caused by $deity knows what. Meds help, but if it's the first big down then you don't even seek help (I didn't seek help until I was 40, and that was only through having a partner who knew what was happening).

Applying rational criteria to what is a most irrational condition is pushing the bounds of rationality itself.:-)

Whether a behavior is rational or not has no bearing on whether it is a selfish behavior or not. Once again, you fail to actually make an argument for suicide not being selfish, you merely state that the person is motivated by irrational thought processes. I agree that depression is a terrible condition that causes people to behave irrationally. In many cases, people suffering from depression behave in outrageously selfish behaviors that are well short of suicide.
As a matter of fact, I suspect that many p

I wasn't trying to make any claims about the selfishness or otherwise of suicide - merely trying to give you an insight into how the application of rational standards to what is an irrational condition maybe isn't valid. For what it's worth, I think making value judgements about the actions of other beings is unsound - the only motivation and reasoning processes anyone can truly understand are those that they experience, and everything else is inference at best.

You are correct, all we can judge are results. One should judge others on the basis of their actions, not their perceived thoughts. There are very few cases where someone committing suicide does not result in more suffering in others than it alleviates in others (alleviating the suffering of the one commtting suicide does not count in the balance for considering whether or not the behavior is selfish).

Flip that statement around: claiming that suicide is selfish is proclaiming that the temporary grief I will experience by the suicide of a loved one is more important than the constant suffering of that loved one. Or to put it another way, my wants are more important than the wants of those I love.

It's the same thing. I don't think you can so easily find and take a moral high ground in such a complex philosophical issue. I think most people would agree that anyone contemplating or attempting suicide needs help, I'm just not sure that insulting someone in such a fragile mental state by calling them selfish is very helpful.

I do not agree that those who desire that someone not committ suicide are necessarily selfish in that desire. However, that is irrelevant to whether or not the act of suicide is selfish. Whether those who care about a potential suicide are selfish or not has no impact on whether or not the act of taking one's own life is selfish.
Basically, not only do I disagree with your argument, but it has no bearing on the point I made. It is possible for those who wish someone to not committ suicide to be selfish and

Very sad news, not only because of his vision and the fact that he was a good geek

Which vision?

but just because 22 is way too soon.

Any news on the causes yet?

Any age is way too soon for anyone active in anything and/or loved by someone. RIP to the guy and his relatives, but some of his e-sycophants herald the news as if he was Dennis Ritchie or Dijkstra. Diaspora was dead on arrival before the first line of code was typed. The he problem statement, the suggested solution, the execution of it, and the coding of it, the very concept behind it were severely flawed and doomed to failure. For anyone that reads this and who wants to learn how to write and

And I definitely think trying to execute the idea is worth a lifetime of talk about ideas. All the time you spend posting "way too often" could be spent coding, or at least guiding others on an open source project if you really have all the architectural issues worked out.

And I definitely think trying to execute the idea is worth a lifetime of talk about ideas

Unfortunately, Diaspora always seemed to fall into the latter category. Lots of UI stuff (none of it original - designing a good UI is hard, copying an existing UI is easy), but no attempt to address any of the problems in that space that are actually difficult, such as how should the network be federated in a way that doesn't allow malicious nodes to harvest information, scales to hundreds of millions of users, and doesn't have a single point of failure.

Sorry for replying again. But if you are sincerely sorry and regret your troll, man up and put your name to the apology. I accept that you may be sorry, but hiding behind the cloak of anonymity means your words and your somewhat cowardice[1] "apology" bear little weight IMO.Cheers, Craig[1] Cowardice because you can't even put your first name in the response as the most minimal gesture.

Oh please! if it was MSFT the hitmen would have spammed the place with bullets but not hit a damned thing. You think they can train their hitmen any better than they plan their product roadmap?

Now if it were Apple it would have been incredibly expensive, but with style and flair, such as taking him up in a Lear Jet and dressing him in a really nice suit and then dropping him onto the point at the top of the Empire State building, while having a note in his pocket written by an academy award winning screenwriter.

And if it were Linux they would have received plans for an elaborate machine gun (released under GPL V2 of course!) and a pile of pig iron and told to "Make it yourself, RTFM noob, its easy!".

When you make a web page that conforms to standards, it is the browser's fault if it cannot render it correctly. Targeting specific browsers is: hard, ugly, mind blowing, and a wasted effort in the long run.

That's fine for your own personal blog. But when you're a company that lives and dies by getting as many users as possible to flock to your banner, you want your site to work in as many browsers as possible.

We find that customers who can't understand the need for a standards-compliant browser are typically difficult to work with and have a high rate of returned merch, so we just throw them at a page that explains why and how they can get a real browser. The ones that we can have a profitable relationship with, follow the instructions. The rest, we believe we are better off without. Fools cut into profits and pandering to fools is bad for employee morale.

If your product or service is not well known or not particularly desirable (or if you actually depend on swindling fools) I can see where you might want to cater to non-compliant browsers. But if what you're selling is something intelligent people already want to buy, you don't need the fools and tools. And if you're building a community, I can understand wanting to have a little "test" up front for the same reasons.

Ok, a little bit of attention to the stuff in bold above:

1. How did that apply to Diaspora? Self-fulfilling prophesy/wishful thinking? I mean, seriously, as far as quality went, the software sucked. Intelligent people saw the silliness of it a mile a way, and more intelligent people went "ewww" when they finally had a grasp on the software. Furthermore, the security holes in it are the types that are already document, examples of what-not-to-do. Where was the intelligence in it? Where was the intelligence

Indeed. Diaspora is not a competitor of anything at all. It's just a make-believe solution looking for a poorly understood problem statement that rings the bell for a very small subset of those into online communities. The saddest part, and the greatest indictment, of movements such as this, is the amount of security holes present in a software that was supposed to provide a better, safer alternative to FB. And that went beyond misunderstanding the problem, but not even knowing how to code secure web softwa